Google Drive for iOS brings TouchID, file access in any app

There are plenty of cloud storage options out there, but none quite as good as Google Drive. Google’s home-grown cloud storage option is cross platform, available to anyone for free, syncs seamlessly, and is easily accessible. A big part of Google’s cloud storage footprint is on iOS, where both iPad and iPhone owners use it in place of — or addition to — iCloud. Today, Google ash upgraded Drive to suit a growing number of iOS 8 users, as well as the ever-increasing iPhone 6 user-base.

The update to Drive on iOS optimizes the service for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus screens, and also lets you use TouchID to open your app. If you want to use TouchID instead of a passcode, you’ll first have to have a passcode set-up for Drive. After you have that set-up via settings, you can take advantage of TouchID.

You’ll also be able to save videos locally from Drive. To save a video from Drive to your Camera Roll, just select “Save Video” when you have the video open.

If you don’t want to view a file in Drive, you can now open files saved to Google’s cloud in other apps. Make changes, and those are synced once you close the file and it re-saves to Drive. That makes Drive one heck of a cloud storage photo editing repository, and mimics the Drive update Google pushed for Chrome earlier.

Except for the video saving option, everything else is iOS 8 only. As the cloud storage wars get serious, this is a pretty major move for mobile, and on the largest mobile platform around.